A problem easily fixed?

Seeing Adam Creighton is against an increase in compulsory superannuation, I now feel pretty confident that some increase was in fact warranted.  And let's face it, the Coalition is not saying they are against an increase happening eventually, they've just delayed it.

But what I wanted to note was Creighton's argument in the Australian this morning that compulsory superannuation is a "failure" because it is failing to reduce dependency on the pension to a large enough degree.

Yet the reason he gives for this - the pension assets and income test being too generous - is surely one of the economically easiest things to change in future.   And what's more, isn't ensuring that more money is in super in the first place one of the key ways of ensuring that the tightening of the test is easier to politically and economically justify?

Surely you would have more chance of arguing for phased in reduction of government contribution to pension support if you can point to the increase in superannuation income that you're also ensuring for the future?

Update:   just wanted to make it clear again that I was saying that changing the assets/income test is economically easy - in the sense that it can be relatively clear where to set the line and what effect it will have on future government outlays - but not that it was necessarily politically easy.    However, it becomes politically easier if you can tell people their superannuation will be larger too.

And here's another thing - I've noticed small government types are pretty hot for the Singaporean system of health care which works to a large extent on forced contributions to health savings accounts.   (Someone on boring old Amanda Vanstone's Radio National show was talking up something similar the other day.)  

So why are they so against compulsory super savings in Australia?  Is it just because of Union involvement in industry super?

And really, whatever arguments are against compulsory superannuation (due to fees and questionable tax treatment for those who need it least), do small government economists really think people left alone make adequate savings for retirement? 

I hear a lot of whining, but don't hear much about alternatives....

The old Michael Ware is back on my TV

Seven years ago I noted how annoying I found former CNN war correspondent Michael Ware, an Australian given to talking in perpetual hyperventilating Steve Irwin style.

And he's on my TV right now, on The Drum, with Brisbane's Story Bridge in the background (he lives here?) and he's still the same, and still really irritating.

In other Arab news

While admitting that I like the idea of being in charge of an Australian version of the Saudi Arabian institution known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, I would have to run it better than this:

Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice on Tuesday removed four of its staff from the Riyadh office after it found them guilty of assaulting a British national and his Saudi wife....

Reports late on Friday said that the Briton was approached by the members of the Commission when he took a check-out at a supermarket reserved for women and families.

When they asked him about his presence in the special lane, he answered that he was with his wife and had the right to use it.

However, the Commission members felt frustrated by the answer and followed the couple until they reached their car outside the mall where they had a physical altercation.

Update:  a little bit of video of the guy being jumped on for being in the women's checkout lane can be seen at the Daily Mail here.

I'd hate to see what they do to someone who goes through the "12 items or less" lane with 13 things.

And by the way, the Daily Mail site has a picture of Riyadh, a city you don't often see much of:

What's the building that looks like the eye of a needle?  I'll have to check:  I see, it's Kingdom Centre, which has a shopping mall, hotel and apartments.   [And, being Saudi Arabia, public floggings in the courtyard on the hour for men caught looking sideways at women with accidentally exposed ankles.]

You can also go up to the "skybridge" at the top.  Photos at its website here. 

Update:   looking around at other local websites reporting this widely publicised story, I have to admit that most of the 40 comments at Arab News (most of which appear to be Saudis) are critical of the Virtue Police.   One comment details another incident, which I repeat for its comedy value (as long as you're not the victim):

There have been many such instances which either go unreported or no action is taken even after a complaint is lodged. A few years ago, the religious police raided a staff house belonging to a corporate in Olaya locality of Riyadh which housed a few Keralites among which one of them happened to be a friend. The religious police searched the entire flat and found a few pornographic CD's, all the flat members were locked up in the toilet from 10 PM to 4 AM and the entire duration was spent by the religious police examining the evidence thoroughly on a flat screen television. Fortunately the flat members were let out after the call for Fajr salah and the religious police left without saying a word.

Ms Popularity

Judith Sloan is having a hot run in the unpopularity stakes at the moment.  From The Australian:

JUDITH Sloan makes some false assertions about how one of my reporters does her job (“Paper’s slant against self-managed super is just so wrong”. 2/9). Sloan suggests she’s “pretty sure” the journalist did not ferret through the Australian Taxation Office website to get figures about self-managed super funds and that she was “probably fed them” by industry super funds.

After speaking to the reporter, and backed by my knowledge of how she works, I am more than pretty sure that Sloan is wrong. My reporter got the numbers from the ATO. She was not fed them by interested parties.

It is one thing to vigorously contest issues. It is another to make false claims about the professionalism of a journalist because you disagree with the angle of a story — all without checking your assertions.
Michael Stutchbury, editor-in-chief, The Australian Financial Review, Sydney, NSW

Well, this is confusing...

We seem to have a bit of a bizzaro world reversal going on in the reaction to the Abbott government putting substantial delay into an increase into compulsory superannuation contributions paid by employers.

The Australian website has been running as its headline article a David Crowe report that would not keep the Abbott government happy at all.  The subheading:

WORKERS will take a $20,000 hit to their retirement savings from a shock deal in the Senate to repeal the mining tax, with the Abbott government blaming Labor for forcing it to agree to the change. The losses could reach twice as much for young workers on high incomes, according to an exclusive analysis for The Australian that reveals the impact on millions of employees who will miss out on an increase in their superannuation over the next five years.

(Of course, the paper also contains a "You're Magnificent, Abbott!" piece by the ever obsequious Denis Shanahan about the very same deal.) 

But over at Fairfax, we have Peter Martin talking up the decision to not increase the tax contributions because it was clearly going to eat into salary growth too much.  With the headline "The Coalition helps the workers", the Martin article takes exactly the Abbott line on the issue.

It will be some time before I know what to think about this....

The El Nino that may or may not come

Stalled El Nino poised to resurge : Nature News & Comment

Certainly, no one expects a super strong El Nino now, but I am curious about what happened to the large body of subsurface warm water that they had been tracking across the Pacific earlier this year...

Just trying to be helpful

About this nude celebrity photos in the cloud being stolen business:   I think, given the ubiquity of youthful ownership of phones with cameras, that it's probably a fair assumption in the West that about 95% of males under 25 are already the subject of a nude picture (either of all of their body or part of it), and about 70% of females.   (The other gender difference being that, for men, the majority are likely self taken, but for women, more are taken by their boyfriend.)   It's become so rampant that it may as well be incorporated into some sort of coming of age ritual.  Perhaps at 21,  everyone could have a nude shot of their choice (personality dictating how rude the choice actually is) loaded up to the national  iNude service, with access available to anyone for a modest (ha! pun) fee - perhaps $1 per view, with nearly all of that going to the photo subject.  Of course, how to deal with those who then save and spread the pic to others for free is something I'm not sure how to deal with - I see that the Snapchat self erasing idea is pretty easy to evade.   But if we believe libertarians, if you make the cost of legitimate access cheap enough, people won't pirate.  (A likely story...)

Anyway, the point of the exercise is that if society is based on an assumption that everyone can or will be legitimately viewed nude, celebrities can stop fretting so much about their secret nude photos being stolen.  I guess that's assuming the photo they are worried about is a mere nude one.   If it is one involving sexual activity that they did not want taken or realised - well, the fact that you were already available nude on line might make the unfairness of further intimate releases so much clearer that they are less likely to be clicked on.  (And civil action against the person who released them more justified.) 

As the title says, just trying to be helpful...

Nuclear disasters last a long time...

Radioactive wild boar roaming the forests of Germany - Telegraph

 This rather surprising report states:

Twenty-eight years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, its effects are still
being felt as far away as Germany
– in the form of radioactive wild boars.

Wild boars still roam the forests of Germany, where they are hunted for their
meat, which is sold as a delicacy.

But in recent tests by the state government of Saxony, more than one in three
boars were found to give off such high levels of radiation that they are
unfit for human consumption.

 In a single year, 297 out of 752 boar tested in Saxony have been over the
limit, and there have been cases in Germany of boar testing dozens of times
over the limit.

Germany's radioactive boar problem is not expected to go away any time soon.
With the levels of contamination still showing in tests, experts predict it
could be around for another 50 years. 

Astounding hypocrisy

There are few things more annoying than libertarians who freely admit to flaunting the property rights of American film and TV producers by downloading pirated copies of whatever fantasy gory pornquest they currently enjoy, and then deride government attempts to stop them.

And the justification that they give - well, business always knows right, according to libertarians, except when it interferes with their TV viewing habits:

The IPA believes a better way to deal with online piracy in Australia would be to introduce a "fair use exception".

Mr Breheny said he was "concerned" and "alarmed" that the government was not placing more emphasis on the importance of innovation and technological advances, such as content streaming platforms, to resolve piracy issues over ineffective regulations. He said ultimately rights holders needed to take responsiblity by ensuring their content was accessible and affordable.

Yeah, an individual's right to own and do what they want with their property is really important to libertarians, and one of the few things they want government to do is to protect such rights, but their view on TV piracy  comes down to this:  "hey, studio/government, if you don't let us watch it for free, or at least make it cheap enough, of course we'll steal it anyway.  What d'ya expect?" 

 

Gin considered

Some amusingly odd bits from a review of a book about the history of gin:

All the horrors of 18th-century Gin Lane are here, including instances of child alcoholism. In an effort to stop the entire population of London reeling with gin, successive governments tried different restrictions. But the determined always found a way. Captain Dudley Bradstreet set up a secret distillery in Holborn in 1736; in the street outside the door he placed a wooden cat, with a leaden pipe concealed under its paw. Customers would approach and whisper “puss”; if they heard a “miaow” in reply, they would then whisper their order, put coins in the cat’s mouth and the gin would be funnelled through the pipe. 

Williams lavishes loving detail on the evolution of gin’s manufacture, as well as its slow Victorian ascent of the social scale. Tonic wasn’t far behind; at the Great Exhibition of 1851, a 27ft (8.2m) fountain flowed with Schweppes. The 20th century brought glamour: the swish cocktail bars of London’s smartest hotels and the advent of James Bond’s gin/vodka martini. The publicity-loving diabolist Aleister Crowley claimed to have invented a gin cocktail called the Kubla Khan number 2, which involved the addition of laudanum.

How were the chronic alcohol problems of urban England in the 18th and 19th centuries actually overcome,  I wonder?  Can't say that I know of the answer to that.  Surely it wasn't just the moral example of Queen Victoria?

Also, I didn't recall this:

Their 16th-century predecessors in Holland – gin, or “genever” as it was called there, was thought to have been invented medicinally by one Dr Franciscus Sylvius – would recognise the process now. So how did the beery British get a taste for it? Williams blames William of Orange, noting that the phrase “Dutch courage” is thought to have originated with soldiers taking slugs of gin in the Thirty Years War.

 Sounds like an entertaining book.

Update:  OIC - the "gin epidemic" was mainly a feature of the 18th century.  Interesting article all about it here.

And as for what happened with drinking in England in the 19th century, try this:

They offer evidence of how cost and access effect consumption:

"(T)he 18th-Century gin craze was linked to the government's encouragement of gin production and restriction of brandy imports; the rise in consumption in the 19th Century was associated with rising living standards."

However, that nose-dive in alcohol consumption you can see on the graph in 1914 was the result of "the most sustained attempt to come to grips with drink in British history":

"Measures included shorter opening hours, higher duties on beer, and significant reductions in both the production and strength of beer. The amount of beer consumed in 1918 was nearly half of the pre-war total, despite rising incomes, and arrests for drunkenness in England and Wales fell from 190,000 to 29,000 between 1913 and 1918."

The historians also point to important cultural effects. One observed a decline in drinking in the late 19th Century and suggested that this was due to "many counter-attractions for working-class consumers (music halls, football, cigarettes, and holidays)".

How Islamic State happened

BBC News - Islamic State: Where does jihadist group get its support?

Sounds like a decent explanation here of the political bungling in the Middle East led to money flowing to IS.


Incidentally - now that Saudi Arabia is scared of what they have (not entirely intentionally) helped create, when is someone in the West going to call on them to help solve the problem by putting their own military in the fight?

As if some Middle East Muslims didn't think they had enough reasons to fight already....

Saudis risk new Muslim division with proposal to move Mohamed’s tomb - Middle East - World - The Independent

The plans, brought to light by another Saudi academic who has exposed and criticised the destruction of holy places and artefacts in Mecca – the holiest site in the Muslim world – call for the destruction of chambers around the Prophet’s grave which are particularly venerated by Shia Muslims.

The 61-page document also calls for the removal of Mohamed’s remains to the nearby al-Baqi cemetery, where they would be interred anonymously.

There is no suggestion that any decision has been taken to act upon the plans. The Saudi government has in the past insisted that it treats any changes to Islam’s holiest sites with “the utmost seriousness”.

But such is the importance of the mosque to both Sunni and Shia Muslims that Dr Irfan al-Alawi warned that any attempt to carry out the work could spark unrest. It also runs the risk of inflaming sectarian tensions between the two branches of Islam, already running perilously high due to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.

Hardline Saudi clerics have long preached that the country’s strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam – an offshoot of the Sunni tradition – prohibits the worship of any object or “saint”, a practice considered “shirq” or idolatrous.

Um, if no one is going to agree to a suggestion that would be like throwing a tanker full of Saudi oil  on an existing fire, why publicise it at all??

Update:   searching back on posts I made earlier on Islam, I was interested to re-read this one based on an interview in 2006 on ABC's Religion Report with a Catholic priest who had lived for decades in Pakistan.   He was warning then of a future intensification of the conflict between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East:

Robert McCulloch was back home in Australia recently for a few days break, and he agreed to come into the ABC studio to talk about what life is like for Christians in Pakistan. He arrived clutching his copy of Pope Benedict's new Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, which he'd been to busy to read prior to his holiday. He talks about being surrounded by pervasive bigotry that seeps into every aspect of Pakistani society, and living with a permanent state of threat.

Robert McCulloch: Yes I think the characteristic of the nation unfortunately is one of conflict, even though the President and Prime Minister have on occasion said that Islam is a religion of tolerance and peace, a dominant reality of the society is the conflict between the various sects or divisions or groupings of Muslims within Pakistan, in particular Sunni and Shia. And even amongst the various groupings within those two major groupings that you've got there, and the conflict, verbal, literary, even bombings which are taking place in the north of the country in Gilgit up in the northern areas, there's a warfare going on between Sunni and Shia and that's got ramifications in every aspect of the society pay-back, it seeps over into the society and makes it conflictual.

Stephen Crittenden: It's been suggested to me in fact that it might well be harder to be a Shi'ite in Pakistan perhaps than it is even to be a Christian.

Robert McCulloch: No, I wouldn't agree with that. I think Christians have their own problems, especially exacerbated by the blasphemy laws that we might want to talk about a little later, but leaving ourselves on that question of being a Shi'ite in Pakistan, or a Shia in Pakistan, I'd like to relate that a little bit to the wider global scene, at least in the Middle East, that the conflict that unfortunately has emerged between Israel and Lebanon, I believe has taken the focus off a major conflict that has been emerging in the Middle East and other areas over the past few years. And it's been the conflict between Sunni and Shia. I think it's becoming more and more evident in Iraq that it's a conflict in Islam. It's certainly an issue with the minority of Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia that are as discriminated against as Christians.

Stephen Crittenden: And you say that actually may well be emerging as the big future conflict in the Middle East, the conflict between Shi'ites and Sunnis?

Robert McCulloch: I think so. Looking at the conflict that we actually have in Pakistan, that is spoken about and each year when Ramadan takes place, the celebrations or the commemorations held by the Shias, how is that going to be picked up by fundamentalist groups amongst the Sunnis? It's an area of questioning, major, major questioning. It's ultimately an issue that Muslims themselves I think need to address more carefully. We've got a major conflictual situation in Iraq, people are striving to solve it through violence, and if this is all the relationship can lead to, well there has to be a major question that a lot has to be done.

 That was 8 years ago now.  All his fears appear to have come true...

Good for the heart (but there's a catch)

Wine only protects against CVD in people who exercise

What?  You mean I can't just have a glass of wine each instead of getting exercise?  The world is so unfair...

Bad for the heart

Energy drinks cause heart problems

Really, should bars in dance clubs be allowed to serve these in alcoholic cocktails at all?  (I'm assuming they do that still, despite recent warnings about their danger if you have more than a couple in quick succession.)

Yet more need for that "How to Win Friends and Influence People" book

From the Australian's media diary:

Estranged party
IF you don’t like hearing a few home truths don’t invite this paper’s columnist Judith Sloan to your birthday party. South Australian captains of industry and business leaders were “stunned into silence” on Friday as Sloan delivered a speech at the 175th gala celebrations for Business SA. “It was akin to inviting someone to your birthday party to speak, only to have them tell everyone they’re fat and ugly,” Ish Davies, News Corporation’s regional director of South Australia, told Diary.

Guests at an event hosted by Sunrise’s David Koch were told “Australia can’t afford another Tasmania”. But the wake-up call left Davies feeling a bit uneasy. When he collected an award later that evening he used his acceptance speech to put some “clear distance between The Oz and The Advertiser”. He told the audience: “We’re from the same mothership but they’re estranged.” Our hard-hitting columnist left the venue before Davies took to the stage, but informed by Diary she was working for an “estranged” publication, Sloan said: “They just want to put their heads in the sand.”

Update:   Another report on the speech confirms it went over like a lead balloon:

Academic and media columnist Professor Judith Sloan chose one of the state’s most important occasions to deliver the worst keynote speech I’ve ever heard.

Sloan’s speech was the lowlight of an otherwise remarkable tribute to local enterprise as Business SA celebrated the 175th anniversary of the SA Chamber of Commerce and Industry – the oldest such chamber in Australia.

The business community was ready to celebrate – but the applause turned to jeers as Sloan’s long speech failed to acknowledge any positives about the state’s future.

 I wonder - maybe the woeful reception it got was behind this weekend's rumour that she was on a short list to be Treasury Secretary.   (I go with it being a joke; but with this government, anything is possible.)

About data homogenisation

Good point raised about the effect of data homogenisation that the Bureau of Meteorology undertakes to try to get a more accurate long term temperature record:

Our data on extreme temperature trends show that the warming trend across the whole of Australia looks bigger when you don’t homogenise the data than when you do. For example, the adjusted data set (the lower image below) shows a cooling trend over parts of northwest Australia, which isn’t seen in the raw data.

Anyone who has credulously believed Marohasy, Jonova and their publicity agent Grahan Lloyd are fools.

Yet another fail

Plain packs don't drive smokers to buy cheap imports

Gee.  Just how comprehensively wrong can Davidson, Ergas, Sloan and Creighton get?

Mad doctors

After the remarkable story on TV last week about the cocaine addicted neurosurgeon who left prostitutes for dead but was able to continue operating at a private Sydney hospital, there was this story in the weekend magazine of the Sydney Morning Herald about another mad hospital doctor, although this one has been dead for 26 years.

It's a really amazing story of just how mentally disturbed a hospital doctor can (or could?) be and still work.

You've come a long way, baby

So, I was looking  at that Flickr account that got publicity last week for the huge number of historic book image scans you can look up (and then, if interested, go to the scan of the full book) and stumbled across this one:

which came from this 1889 American travelogue book:    "The boy travellers in Australasia : adventures of two youths in a journey to the Sandwich, Marquesas, Society, Samoan and Feejee islands, and through the colonies of New Zealand, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia".  (They really didn't believe in succinct book titles in those days, did they?)

I was curious to read about their impression of Brisbane, and while there is not much of interest to report about on that topic, in the same chapter, they did get onto the matter of race relations.  This section, for example, makes white men sound rather too delicate for Queensland:

But when we get to the quality of aborigines, who, it is acknowledged, often work on sheep and cattle stations, we get this assessment:

Well, I'm glad we have in modern Australia a more sympathetic assessment of the effect of  sudden exposure to the West had on aboriginal Australia.  Here, for example, is someone at Catallaxy yesterday talking about the PM's somewhat insensitively expressed statement that arrival of the First Fleet was the defining moment for Australia: 

Yes, we've come a long way, baby.    [For those too young to pick up on it:  ironic reference to the Virginia Slims faux feminist advertisements of the 60's and 70's.]


Update:  Oh look:  this time Henry Ergas, someone who actually posts at Catallaxy, talks about aborigines and salaries too:

Rather, the rise in imprisonment rates reflects the changes the 60s brought: the equal wage decision in 1965, which accelerated the collapse in indigenous employment in regional areas; the dismantling of laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to indigenous Australians; and the explosive increase in welfare payments.

 Now, he doesn't actually say that he thinks the equal pay decision was wrong, but given that everyone who posts there hates minimum wages, I wonder if he gives it the tick of approval....  

A weird review outcome

Success. The Renewable Energy Target's greatest failing

So, everyone (including Dick Warburton) seems to agree now that the original claim of Tony Abbott (that the RET is killing everyone with its added cost to electricity) was wrong.

No no, the real problem is that it is reducing CO2 (and at the same time driving down wholesale prices), but at a higher cost than what something else would cost - with the only "something else" that the government will allow being "direct action", which has no specifics yet, and nearly everyone can't see achieving the goal at the low cost the government thinks.

The review therefore looks a bit of an embarrassment, but once again, I expect, we will see Greg Hunt selling his soul and making directly opposite claims to what he did a mere year ago.  (Or I could be wrong, but looking at his track record so far, I doubt it.)

I do not recall ever having a government so full of political, unprincipled opportunism. 

Anyway, Peter Martin's explanation of the review seems pretty spot on to me:

It's killing the coal-fired power generation industry. The panel doesn't put it that crudely. It refers instead to a "transfer of wealth among participants in the electricity market". If by 2020
retailers are required to buy 41,000 gigawatt hours from new pollution-free suppliers, the old polluting suppliers are going to sell 41,000 gigawatt hours less.

It would have hurt in any event, but a time when electricity use is sliding (thanks largely to the carbon tax) it means what was to have been 20 per cent is on track to become 28 per cent.

The abolition of the carbon tax gave coal-fired power generators a windfall. Kneecapping the Renewable Energy Target will give  them a second helping.

Taking business away from coal-fired generators was never an unintended consequence of the Renewable Energy Target as the report seems to suggest, it was a design feature. It has helped cut pollution.

Update:   John Quiggin notes this:

I can certainly see some ways in which the RET could be improved, but I won’t canvass them here so as not to commit myself in advance. I’ll observe however, that the Abbott government itself has removed the strongest argument against the RET, namely, that it duplicates the effect of a carbon price (there were valid counterarguments, which I’ve discussed elsewhere, but it was still an important issue)

And yet, as was reported last week, there was a push from within the government to leave open the option of its complete removal.   That certainly indicates you've got complete ideologues behind the scenes who do not want to see CO2 reduced at any cost...